Murtak wrote:RandomCasualty2 wrote:The thing is that monsters have the abilities you want to give them to influence the plot, and those abilities rarely change their CR at all. Whether a goblin is capable of tracking someone through the forest doesn't really impact its CR at all, which means it's an optional ability that you can tack or not tack on and game balance could probably care less.
Isn't that an artifact of DnD measuring power/CR almost entirely by combat effectiveness? In a game/setting like Shadowrun you do in fact care whether a Lone Star Patrol officer can track you.
That is importantly true. The reason you don't care what anything in 4e can do outside of combat is that the out of combat rules (such as they are) don't work. Indeed, since you are under no circumstances going to use
skill challenges, you're pretty much left with magical teaparty the instant the game leaves the battle grid. And to that extent, monsters are better if they are written to accommodate that fact by having nothing but magical teaparty guidelines for their out of combat activities. I think the thing tat hurts my feeling most about the 4e monster manual is that the monsters
don't have magical teaparty guidelines. This is literally the entire set of teaparty guidelines for the
Succubus (the poster child for magical teaparty and non-combat shenaniganry):
4e Monster Manual wrote:SUCCUBI TEMPT MORTALS into performing evil deeds, using their shapechanging abilities to appear as attractive men and women. Although seduction and betrayal are their forte, succubi are also practiced spies and assassins.
Succubi serve more powerful devils as scouts, advisors, and even concubines. Because of their guile and shapechanging ability, they are frequently chosen to serve as infernal emissaries to important mortals.
Seriously, that's the whole thing. Aargh. Tempt? Tempt with
what? What are they authorized to actually give you in exchange for your evil deeds? Gosh, I wish the system for convincing people of stuff worked in this game. :tares hair:
But that's honestly only part of it. Yes, everyone in 4e is boring and simple. And by extension the monsters are even more boring and even simpler. But that's really only the surface and only a specific case.
Let's go back to the case of a soldier in Afghanistan, because it's a very telling example. He has a lot of equipment that he is carrying around. And that's fine. It's also fine that while he is equipping himself he has to carefully consider how much ammunition he carries, because the bullets alone to refill a magazine weigh 576 grams. That really eats into your weight allowance for food, tents, climbing gear, and water purifiers. So tracking one's bullets leads to a nicely gritty survival horror scenario that is very appropriate for crawling around the wastes of Afghanistan.
But now let's talk about Pashtun child Soldier #4. Frankly, while the fact that he is going to take a bullet to the eye despite the fact that he is 11 is a very important part of the tragedy and grinding despair of the scenes surrounding his one appearance in the story; the fact is that he only hs one appearance
in the story. Going through the same deliberative process of deciding what to bring and what not to that the PCs did is kind of a waste of time. And in any case however much ammunition he has it won't really be like the PC's limited supply because he's never going to show up in a later scene. So tracking bullets, in addition to being kind of baseless (since we weren't keeping track of his goat hunting expenditures before he came on camera), also doesn't even get us where we want him to be. We want Child Soldier #4 to
act like the PC soldiers in that he acts like his ammo is precious.
So what we're probably going to do is give Pashtun Child Soldier #4 an alternate ammo tracking system where he just rolls to run out every time he fires, and if he goes full auto his rolls to run out are that much worse. This is a completely different system than the PCs use, but it actually means that he is encouraged to not waste shots like the PCs are and the PCs don't know when he'll run dry. And it doesn't "feel" like the NPCs are cheating or playing with a different physics engine. Which ironically it
would if they were actually using the same rules for the duration that they were on screen. Because a crucial part of the PC rules
is the fact that it carries over from one scene to the next - scenes which we actually know Pashtun Child Soldier #4 was not involved in and won't live to see.
In a very real way, the NPCs are pawns and rooks while PCs are entire Chess
positions. All the NPCs are moved around by a player in the same way and with the same total concentration as all the actions and equipment of one of the PCs is. But ideally that mechanic fact should be hidden behind layers of storytelling and obfuscatory mechanics such that it feels the an NPC Elf Archer is just as much a real person in the world as the PC Elf Archer.
Where 4e D&D went seriously off the rails is getting that backwards. They put in player interfaces that accentuated and played off the fact that NPCs were just playing pieces. And then they gave the NPCs ability scores and power names that confused the issue
for the DM by making it seem from a mechanical standpoint like they might be acting like PCs, when in fact they were not.
The goal should be the opposite. The strings should be clearly visible to the GM, because he's the guy pulling them. But the strings should be pulling things in such a manner that the NPCs
feel like they live in the same world as the PCs.
-Username17
